High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Building a Value PC with Cooler Master’s Gladiator 600 Case
The Value Gamer
Welcome to the first part of our value series. We are currently deep into a world-wide financial recession, and although most gamers would love to upgrade regularly and have Tri-Fire or SLi graphics systems powered by the most expensive overclocked quad core CPU to play their DX10 PC games, most of us must be practical. For the first time, we are going to be dealing with the word, BUDGET. We want to see how close to our Intel PC’s performance that we can come, while building a completely new PC that is not only a competent gaming performer at 1920×1200, but one that won’t break our bank. Our introduction was published last week.
The Hardware and Conditions for our value gamer
Gladiator 600 is a beautiful case
We want a handsome PC in a nicely cooled case, a quality CPU cooler and a solid power supply unit (PSU) that will handle a multi-core CPU and CrossFire. We expect you are probably upgrading from your current PC and will migrate your keyboard, mouse, optical drives, hard drives, LCD and operating system to your new build. We chose a CrossFire motherboard as we are going to explore AMD’s value CPU and GPU choices. We will also examine the stock and overclocked gaming performance of the Athlon II 250 X2 vs. the Phenom II 550 X2 vs. Phenom II 720 X3. We will match our new gaming build against our current maxed out, and much more expensive, Intel Penryn Core2Quad system – at stock, clock for clock and then at each CPU’s max OC. To be completely fair in our benchmarking for both Intel and AMD platforms, we are benchmarking with two graphics cards each – Nvidia’s GTX 280 and ATi’s HD 4870-X2 and we are using identically configured PCs and identical hard drives in comparing them.
From the image (above) from Cooler Master’s site, we see the Gladiator 600 case is handsome indeed. Yet even a professionally captured picture does it little justice compared to “in person” and our own images will simply attempt to capture the excitement and experiences we have had building a new PC with an awesome value case.
The Value Series:
We plan to break this series into several parts – although we may combine or expand the categories along the way (and the benchmarks will be published very soon as they are now finalized):
1. The case
2. The power supply
3. The CPU and CPU Cooler
4. The motherboard and system RAM
5. The video cards and setting up
6. Overclocking and fine-tuning performance
7. The Benchmarks
Why Cooler Master?
We have come to appreciate Cooler Master during the 10 months that ABT has been reviewing hardware. They stand out as a company that is dedicated to creating great cooling solutions and their innovations are impressive. What this editor finds to be especially refreshing is that they are very responsive to comments and even constructive criticism from the end user. As an example, it was suggested that their entry-level cooler Hyper N520 was time consuming to change out in this review because you had to remove the motherboard. We even contemplated cutting a hole in the motherboard tray to allow access! Well, Cooler Master actually did this with their newer series of cases, including the Gladiator 600, which we are reviewing right here and now!
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It’s refreshing to see a build guide that puts performance first without pretending the budget doesn’t exist. I’ve been down the road of trying to squeeze every last frame out of older parts, and the Gladiator 600’s cooling focus really speaks to me—heat is always the silent killer in value builds. The way you balance the CPU and GPU for 1920×1200 gaming is exactly the kind of practical advice I wish I’d had years ago. Speaking of practical tools, when I’m taking a break from benchmarking, I often pull up this afinador drop C to tune my guitar and clear my head before the next round of tweaks. It’s a nice reminder that high performance isn’t just about hardware—it’s about enjoying the whole experience.